Recommended reading

I cannot recommend this piece by Jessamyn West on the quandary of inheriting a person's digital remains enough. Take ten minutes from your day to read it, you won't regret it. (Especially the passages about her father's house.)

On the radio

First time back on the radio for 2015 today, and I'll be talking about a virtual Museum of Stolen Art, the recent finding against Luc Tuymans in a copyright case, and The Dowse's summer Wikipedia project.

Confirming that there are few things worse than listening to your own voice

This week's edition of The Dowse podcast sees Sasha and Cat embark on their mission to demystify museum jobs by talking to me about being a first-time director.

Yo Yo Yo

Today was a good day at work for a few reasons. One of the big ones was that we launched a new experiment - The Dowse Podcast.

The podcast is designed to be a short, quite playful look at the workings of the art world and art galleries. You can read more in this blogpost.


I'm thrilled about the podcast for two reasons. The main one is that Sasha Greig (front of house host) and Cat Auburn (exhibition preparator) have taken this idea from pitch to reality. This isn't a comms or curatorial project - it's two people who are interested and interesting, trying a new way to share The Dowse spirit.

The second, smaller, reason is that Sasha and Cat agreed to call the inaugural podcast Yo Yo Yo when I asked them to :)

Connections

Every so often, I toy with the idea of a PhD.* I don't know what it would be on, exactly, but it would be something to do with tracing webs of connections - whether that's relationships between changes in arts funding and arts practice, or the way curators/directors have moved around the country and how that's influenced programming, or a study on women in the museums profession, or the movements in influence between Dunedin at the start of the 20th century, Christchurch in the 1930s-1950s and Auckland from the 1960s onwards. History, so far as I can make out, is the outcome of the jostling of personality, social connections, opportunity and hazard, and I'd like to test that idea against some research and data.

I'm thinking about that this weekend as I've been reading this NYT article on MOMA's Object:Photo project. A 'multi-platform' project (exhibition, book, website and symposium) that's taken four years to develop, it is based the Thomas Walther Collection of ~300 photographs from the 1920s and 1930s which MOMA acquired in 2001. As with our present moment, that period was one of rapid technological development and new infrastructures and conversations sprang up around photography.

MOMA's team has taken the collection as a microcosm through which to explore the moment. I can't speak for any of the other formats, but the website is what's got me thinking about the connections that are the building blocks of art history. Using the Visualization section of the site you can compare photo techniques and trace artist's geographical movements. But the most interest tool lets you trace connections between artists, by school, major exhibitions, cultural hubs, photo industry hubs and publications, allowing you to ask questions like which artists identified with the Bauhaus movement also worked for Vogue? 

As I continue to chip away on our Wikipedia project at The Dowse, I've realised that 'joining up' pages are very important to the endeavour. We needed, for example, a page about the New Vision Gallery to flesh out the early careers of many artists. A page was needed on Bone Stone Shell. I'm currently pulling info together one about the Portage Awards, and we've added info about the Arts Foundation Laureate Awards and the Creative New Zealand Craft/Objects Art Fellowship and Pacific Arts Awards, all to provide greater context.

What's missing though are the generational and social connections, and that's where I could see something like MOMA's project being really interesting for New Zealand art history. So much to ponder.

*The reason I think I couldn't ever undertake a PhD is that I've discovered I really like to work collaboratively - or even more accurately, socially - on projects, and I don't think I could apply myself to such a solitary task for such a long time. If however a way of taking on PhDs in a more collaborative way emerges, I'll be there with boots on.

Some things I read this morning

37-year-old curator Dr Nicholas Cullinan has been announced as the new director of London's National Portrait Gallery, the 12th in its 158-year history. Currently a curator at the Met, and co-curator of the Matisse cut-outs show, Cullinan worked as a host at the Portrait Gallery in his early 20s. Cue Drake.

artnet News asked 20 women in the visual arts whether the art world is biased.

I've been lucky enough to work only under women directors but all the institutions they inherited had an annual budget of $15 million or less, which is the glass ceiling of female women directorships. Sexism is a broad problem that cannot be reduced to simply men oppressing women, but is about the set of expectations we have and the goals we set for each other that need serious reevaluation.
—Naomi Beckwith, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

George Oates, now of Good Form & Spectacle, has worked with Tom Armitage to create the V&A Spelunker, a way of mining through the V&A's vast collections using the fields in the collection catalogue that a 'normal human' could interpret. I'm particularly interested by what George says in her blog post about the Date Graph, where they have matched up 'data created' with 'date acquired'.

Perhaps because I've spent a lot of time with digitised collections, or because I'm not easily swayed by visualisations and maps and graphs, I find it hard to get extremely excited about these projects, but that feature really does trigger insights about how the collection has developed, and gets you asking questions.

On the radio

On the radio today I'll talk about Metro magazine's nomination of Michael Parekowhai's light house sculpture as a 'best is yet to come', and art books for Christmas.

Ummm. Hmmm. Yeah.

I'm finding Ellen Gamerman's series of articles about trends in American museums for the Wall Street Journal interesting, but weirdly - slanted? It's hard to put my finger on it, but there's a vague air throughout them that museums are out to exploit the punters. (See this earlier piece on crowd-curating & the online responses.)

Gamerman's latest is on museums and visitor data, and the moves (led by the Dallas Museum of Art) to use various forms of tracking to learn more about visitor behaviour. None of this is news to me, or particularly unsettling (the comment about the MIA's programming changes in response to visitor surveys aside) but if I was a punter and not a professional I'd probably feel well creeped out.

Learning WIkipedia

This month at The Dowse we've officially launched a summer Wikipedia project, researching and adding biographical entries for New Zealand craft/applied art artists to the site.

We've learned a lot already, and we're going to be regularly blogging about the project. I didn't expect to be very hands-on with the project - in fact, I was quite scared of the Wikipedia culture and frankly have been avoiding it for years now.

However, I've been sucked in, and over the last few weekends I've found myself diligently at my laptop, doing battle with rules around notability and wiki mark-up to create and edit pages. There's a real satisfaction to creating something that 30 or 40 minutes ago didn't exist - putting Alan Preston or Tanya Ashken or Manos Nathan into a place where I feel they belong - and more importantly, a place where they become more discoverable to the world.

If you want to follow progress - or join in! - there's also a scratchpad on Wikipedia itself you can review and add to.

Things you should read

For a Wellingtonian, I've bought an unusual number of copies of Metro magazine this year, and that's credit to the room they're giving arts writer Anthony Byrt for pieces like this: Why Michael Parekowhai’s State House Sculpture is Worth Celebrating.

On the radio

Squeezed for time this week, we only snuck in a garbled (I had to phone in, which I loathe doing) segment on the 40th anniversary of Fingers, one of the world's longest running contemporary jewellery galleries.

The American system

“A $10,000 gift to a smaller museum can make a huge impact, and the donor will see a deeper engagement with the institution. To get to that level at one of the larger institutions, you have to give millions.” 

That’s a fine final point. For all of the glory bestowed on a trustee at one of the august museums on our list, moderately wealthy benefactors would be wise to be contrarians. Their time, money, and collection are likely to be treated better, have more impact, and serve society better when put to work at a regional or local museum.

The American system of museum fundraising and patronage just fascinates me. This article in Barrons outlines how American museums have recovered from the GFC and subsequent withering of their endowments.